Savvis Co-Founder Andrew Gladney Gets 33 Months in Federal Pen

A United States District Court judge sentenced Andrew Gladney this morning to 33 months in a federal prison for extortion.

Andrew Gladney

The 46-year-old Clayton native was charged in December 2007 of two counts of harassing communications and one count of extortion.

In May 2008, Assistant U.S. Attorney Howard Marcus dropped the harassing communications charges in exchange for Gladney's guilty plea to extortion.

Gladney is a co-founder of the broadband Internet company that later became Savvis and an heir to the 7-Up soft-drink fortune. More recently he was a minority owner of Mosaic restaurant.

Between March and November, 2007, Gladney sent a series of threatening and extortionate emails to his wife's brother in Virginia after his wife, Susan "Jia-Jye" Wu Gladney, told him that she had had a 20-year incestuous affair with her brother, according to court papers and testimony.

Susan Gladney told her husband that the affair with her brother included sexual relations during the weekend that she married Andrew Gladney, according to court papers and testimony. The revelations sent Gladney into a fit of rage.

On March, 29, 2007, Gladney he wrote in an email to his brother-in-law:

"You better have $10,000 deposited in Jia-Jye's account by the end of the day, and $15,000 by the end of Friday. If you don't have it, to [sic] fucking bad! Borrow it, Mr. Harvard Sisterfucker...![sic] today, 15 Friday for at total of $25 Grand by close of business Friday, or the videotaped interview that I shot of Jia-Jye confessing to the affair and adding to the specifics in grim, grim detail, from 1986/1987, until 2006, at the motel in St. Louis will be copied and distributed to as many people as I can get it to in the CDC, Drexel Hospital, Punahoe School, Penn, etc. The first to get the news and the first tape copy will be your parents, and all of your family."

In another message to his brother-in-law sent the same day, Gladney added: "By the way, lest you think that any of this is illegal- it is not. It's only extortion if the 'act' being covered up is a crime, not a sick double life."

According to court papers, Susan Gladney sent her brother an e-mail on May 10, 2007, stating:

"[Andrew] is untouchable and can and has always gotten away with anything and everything he has done and I don't mean he merely skipped out of jury duty. He has power and force in place [sic] that are so far reaching, it should make any person who know [sic] his true capabilities and is in sound mind/living in this country TREMBLE IN FEAR."

Susan Gladney later told Andrew Gladney that the incestuous affair was a fabrication. Asked why she made up such a story, Scott Rosenblum, Gladney's defense attorney says, "They were drug-induced fantasies."

According to court testimony and filings, Gladney has struggled with addictions to cocaine and crack.

A social worker/counselor, Jean Caine, testified in court Friday that Gladney is recovering from drug abuse.

Gladney has been detained in jail since his arrest on December 14 last year. Wearing tan jail garb and leg shackles in court Friday, he told U.S. District Court Judge Richard Webber that he was filled with the "deepest regret and remorse for [his] actions."

"I'm in a deeply different place now," Gladney told the judge.

"I humbly beseech you for leniency in your sentencing," said Gladney, adding that he wanted to get back to his life "with the renewed gifts and understanding" that he gained through eleven sessions of counseling and the last ten months in jail.

Judge Webber did not depart from the advisory sentencing guideline - 33 to 41 months - in deciding Gladney's fate. Part of the sentence includes drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

Gladney will not have to pay a fine or restitution. His lawyers testified that he is "almost destitute," and without access to the trust fund he once enjoyed.

Judge Webber also ordered that Gladney be placed on probation following his jail sentence.

Susan Gladney, present in the courtroom with two friends for the sentencing, burst into tears as Webber began to read his judgment. Andrew Gladney turned to look at her numerous times in what appeared to be an effort to console her.

Gladney was the subject of a two-part series in Riverfront Times earlier this year ("7-Up vs. Coke.")